2024 marks thirty years for Sony’s PlayStation brand, one which began as an upstart console to compete with Nintendo and Sega before it grew into a generations-spanning juggernaut of its own. Countless faces of gaming, whether they be iconic or obscure, ride-or-die or merely transient passers-by, have called a PlayStation console home at one point or another. In celebration of PlayStation’s thirty-year journey to this point, Sony announced Astro Bot for the PlayStation 5, a collectathon-style platformer featuring all sorts of references and connections to many titles and franchises across the decades of PlayStation.
Astro Bot was developed by Team Asobi, a team originally formed as a division of Japan Studio. If you’re unfamiliar with the name Japan Studio, they were known under a few other names (e.g. Sony Computer Entertainment Japan). They were the ones behind a great many classic PlayStation titles such as Ape Escape, The Legend of Dragoon, and Gravity Rush, before ultimately being restructured into and succeeded by Team Asobi. After the PS4 VR title Astro Bot Rescue Mission and the PS5 pack-in title Astro’s Playroom, Astro Bot is the first game in this series released as a dedicated retail PS5 console game. As a celebration of the very history of PlayStation itself, it makes sense to have a developer so intimately intertwined with Sony’s history. So let’s take a look at this little love letter of X’s, O’s, △’s, and ▢’s.
Journey Throughout the Years
While minding their business flying through space, Astro and his PS5-shaped spaceship full of Bot look-alikes are attacked by a big goofy green alien named Nebulax. Nebulax proceeds to utterly wreck the ship, scattering the hundreds of Bots across the cosmos and leaving Astro to go and rescue them while gathering the lost core parts of his ship. There are over 300 bots to re-collect across dozens of levels scattered throughout the game as you make your way across several galaxies to confront the green ghoul once more.
Astro Bot has remarkably little text, with scant dialogue to speak of and even tutorials for mechanics usually being visually demonstrated rather than verbally explained. Cutscenes are fairly scarce, but that’s not to say the game is lacking in animation or personality. It has this expressive, jovial cartoonishness to its animations both in and out of gameplay, which makes for an experience that is both charming and funny.
Asobitai – I Want to Play!
More than anything else, Astro Bot is driven by two core aspects: character and gameplay. As our playable protagonist, Astro himself has a fairly basic toolkit to traverse levels with; in most contexts, he can run, jump, hover, and attack by swatting at things. The most interesting aspect about his basic kit is that his hover shoots lasers underneath his feet, which can damage enemies below him as well as break glass. A lot of levels are designed around this particular trait in some form, with many enemies being easier to hit from above, but also many platforms being made of glass that starts to break when hit by the laser, making it require a bit of finesse.
There are also many context-sensitive actions and level-specific abilities throughout the game. The majority of Astro Bot’s stages are built around grabbing a buddy who grants special abilities for any stages they feature in. These include extending gloves for grabbing and punching, a rocket booster that can either boost you vertically or horizontally (depending on the stage), or more dramatic ones like the ability to slow down time. Some of these are very creative conceptually, like the one level that lets Astro turn into a sponge and carry water around and shoot it at obstacles, but even the more typical ones still lead to engaging gameplay.
Variety is the name of the game here, as each stage has its own aesthetic theme and a gameplay style built around whatever power it features. Astro Bot’s levels are excellently paced, just meaty enough to have an identity of their own with enough room to explore around, without ever dragging their feet. The various powers and diverse level aesthetics keep the game constantly feeling fresh and inspired even when Astro’s base moveset is relatively simple. Across its entire run, I could only recall two levels I did not particularly enjoy. The levels had quite a remarkable amount of consistency in quality given how many there are.
Finding Things
Astro Bot follows in the vein of collectathons of yesteryear; it’s a 3D platformer requiring you to explore and complete objectives to gather collectibles (Bots) scattered throughout the levels to progress. Although it has some obvious resemblances to Super Mario Galaxy (given it’s about an intergalactic collectible hunt), its levels typically follow a somewhat linear course with some branching or hidden sections to explore and find hidden collectibles rather than a series of different unique setpieces for each. I’d be more likely to compare its level design to something like a Spyro or Jak & Daxter as a result, but I also don’t feel like it’s an outright copycat of anything specific that I’ve played.
In addition to Bots, there are also puzzle pieces hidden in each level. Collect enough of them and you unlock additional features at the crash site (the game’s hub) such as the ability to change costumes. Several levels also have alternative hidden exits that create warps to the secret levels of the Lost Galaxy. This gives you plenty to uncover and do throughout your playthrough.
I found it somewhat annoying that most levels have several “points of no return” that require you to completely restart the level if you missed a Bot or puzzle piece and want to go backward. That said, upon beating a level once, you can find a birdhouse at the start of that level and pay 200 coins (which are scattered throughout each level) for a buddy bird who will help point you to objects you missed your first time around. This is helpful and works to truncate the trek through levels you’ve already cleared to hunt for collectibles. It’s also completely optional if you desire that old-fashioned “do it all myself” gameplay experience that was more common in collectathons of old.
This is a collectathon where collectibles are alive rather than an object (or at least as alive as an adorable little robot can be), which is not only that little bit more endearing, but also provides a bit of auditory feedback to help you find their location when close by. Around half of the Bots you can find have a costume resembling that of characters from several classic games and franchises associated with PlayStation. There are cameos from longtime PlayStation mainstays like those from Crash Bandicoot and Killzone, but also some from perennially multiplatform franchises like Persona and Castlevania, and even some surprise deep cuts that made me feel both nostalgic and quite old.
Astro Bot also features a few stages themed specifically around powers that tie heavily into a specific game, such as an Ape Escape level with a Monkey Net or a God of War: Ragnarok level with a Leviathan Axe. The DNA of the PlayStation brand is all over Astro Bot, lending a great deal of its charm and providing ample nostalgia for so many people who grew up with these consoles. Team Asobi clearly made Astro Bot as a love letter to the storied history of PlayStation. Yet even for all the references, it’s still a very competently produced game of its own that never made me feel like “I wish I was playing that game instead right now” whenever it indulged in anything heavily nostalgia-based.
Mechanics and Difficulty
Unlike many other collectathons, Astro Bot doesn’t feature a lot of movement mechanics whenever Astro doesn’t have a level-specific movement ability. Beyond his hover, there’s a noticeable lack of any additional movement options like a sprinting sprint button or special jumps (e.g. wall jumps). While this makes Astro Bot feel a bit slower and less exciting moment-to-moment whenever you don’t have access to any of the special movement abilities, the levels are thankfully compact enough to prevent the game from feeling like a slog. It’s not a super speedy game, but it doesn’t feature overly wide or empty areas and usually has something interesting going on wherever you are. Collectibles are spaced out in ways that you find them frequently enough to give you that sense of reward for finding a thing (especially if it took a bit of work to find it), but they’re not so overly abundant as to become overkill.
Astro Bot is not a very difficult game, but it’s also not one that holds your hand every step of the way either. Most gameplay tutorials are simple and Team Asobi largely leaves you to figure things out, even if obstacles are rarely all that complex. Most of its difficulty comes from the fact that Astro dies in one hit in most stages (boss stages let him take two additional hits). Most of the time, checkpoints are more than abundant enough that a death will not set you back very far, though there are exceptions. While most of the primary levels have multiple bots to discover on your way through, there are also a few challenge and hidden levels in each galaxy which are generally shorter and only feature 1 bot as a reward, but which are often more difficult due to a lack of checkpoints and far more hazards and pits.
Sights, Sounds, and (Dual)Senses
Astro Bot is a very pretty and clean-looking game, with a wide variety of level designs that rarely repeat in terms of aesthetic concepts. It features a lot of colorful levels to match its upbeat tone. While not especially cutscene-heavy, its animations are expressive and always always the sort to put a smile on my face.
The soundtrack by Kenneth C. M. Young fits the game well, with plenty of upbeat tracks and a surprising amount of amusing vocal tracks along the way. I wouldn’t go out of my way to listen to the soundtrack outside of my time playing the game, but it serves the feel the game is going for well. As far as sound design goes, while the game doesn’t have a script, it has plenty of cute little robot vocalizations and more than enough animal and enemy noises to round out its soundscape. Given that Astro Bot is a successor to a game that functions like a demo for the PS5’s DualSense controller, naturally a lot of the game’s sound design is integrated into the controller’s speakers. I recommend adjusting your settings on your DualSense (through your PS5’s settings menu), as game sound can come through a lot louder on your controller than your television on its default settings.
On that note, there are a lot of integrations of the DualSense’s diverse array of features, including its built-in gyroscope for motion controls and even its microphone. Some of these have rather gimmicky applications (and not in a particularly good way), though thankfully you can turn at least some of them off in the game’s accessibility settings. Of the two main levels I did not enjoy, one of them was made a lot worse by motion controls. Still, if nothing else, Team Asobi’s commitment to integrating so many features means I can’t say they didn’t at least try to make this a uniquely PS5 experience.
Verdict
Astro Bot is a game with an incredible amount of love put into it. It’s not quite at the level of a game that makes a PlayStation 5 worth owning all by itself, and it’s not especially long, but it’s the kind of game that any console would gladly feature in its library as a key title. It’s a game with a fair amount of nostalgia behind it, both in terms of its wide array of cameos and it being a collectathon, but it stands on its own as a triumphant adventure of fun and charm in its own right. My playthrough had me smiling at so many points and served as a great reminder of all the hours of joy that I’ve had with PlayStation games over the years.
ASTRO BOT IS HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
If you’re looking for another platformer, why not check out our review of Gal Guardians: Demon Purge?
Many thanks go to my good friend for gifting me a personal copy of Astro Bot for PlayStation 5.
Been playing games since my papa gave me an NES controller in the early 90’s. I play games of almost all genres, but especially focus role-playing, action, and puzzle-platform games. Also an enjoyer of many niche things ranging from speedrunning to obscure music from all over the world.
